


Classicverse 1.8: Deck the Halls

by Elspethdixon, Seanchai



Series: Classicverse [8]
Category: Marvel
Genre: Alternate Universe, Backstory, Fluff, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-01-11
Updated: 2009-01-11
Packaged: 2017-10-23 03:39:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,863
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/245904
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elspethdixon/pseuds/Elspethdixon, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Seanchai/pseuds/Seanchai
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve, Tony, Hank & Jan decorate for Christmas, and we finally learn the story behind Tony blowing up the microwave.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Classicverse 1.8: Deck the Halls

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Украсьте зал](https://archiveofourown.org/works/770263) by [ComradeSoapySoot](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ComradeSoapySoot/pseuds/ComradeSoapySoot)



> Authors' Note: For the cap_ironman Winter Fluff Challenge prompt #24 "past celebrations worthy to remember."

When Tony had suggested that the Avengers have a Christmas party, Jan had jumped at the chance to decorate for it as if she had waited her entire life to drape an Edwardian mansion in pine boughs and white-and-gold turn-of-the century Christmas decorations.

Steve found himself liking it more than he'd expected to. The white Christmas lights gave everything a soft, golden glow and the traditional pine swags and dried, clove-stuffed oranges reminded him of Christmas decorations from his childhood. The mantelpiece in the living room was covered in holly, pine, and fresh oranges that were just like the ones he'd always gotten in the toe of his Christmas stocking.

The only remaining undecorated item was the massive Christmas tree in the front hall, so tall it extended past the first floor landing, halfway to the room's two-story-high ceiling.

"I can't believe you don't have any Christmas tree ornaments," Jan was saying.

Tony shrugged. "My parents had a decorator come in and do a different theme every year."

"So did mine," Jan said, "I mean, until I started doing all that myself. But come on, you have to have _something_ to hang on the tree. Didn't your school ever have you make little ornaments out of foil and construction paper?"

Tony made a throwing away gesture with his hand, shaking his head. "Of course they did, but nobody actually keeps those."

"My father did," Jan said.

"My parents did," said Steve. His mother had kept the bells he'd made out of tin-foil and cardboard and the angels and Santa Clauses he'd scribbled on butchers' paper for years, putting them back up every Christmas. Even during the rest of the year, he couldn't remember a time during his childhood when there hadn't been some piece of his art on display somewhere.

"My parents did to," Hank volunteered, "even the giant spider with the pipe-cleaner legs." He shook his head, a self deprecating little smile on his face. "I think I was probably the weirdest little kid ever."

"No," Jan said, with a little smile and a significant nod towards Tony, "trust me; Tony was weirder."

"What?" Tony dropped the piece of popcorn he'd been trying to string onto a thread and looked up. "No I wasn't. I was a very well-behaved kid."

Jan regarded him with raised eyebrows. "Tony, you were awful. You almost got me grounded for life when I was eight."

"Oh yeah." Tony started to grin. "That. Come on, it was the best Christmas party I've ever been too."

Jan stared at him. "Tony, we spent half the night playing go fish and the other half watching Norman Osborn yell at people."

"Okay, the best party I went to before I got old enough to discover alcohol and sex."

The kind of parties Tony went to didn't sound remotely fun to Steve. What was the point of spending an evening drinking with a bunch of people you didn't really like? He supposed Tony must enjoy it, though. He wouldn’t go otherwise.

Steve frowned. "I know you two knew each other as kids, but I didn't realize you knew each other that well." Tony had told him very little about his childhood, actually. He seemed to prefer talking about current events, or books and movies he'd liked, or whatever project he was currently working on. Truly personal information only entered the conversation if Steve shared some intimate detail of his own, first.

"Our parents were in the same social circle," Jan said, "so we got dragged to the same parties a lot."

"How did he get you grounded?" Hank asked. "I thought you were your father's little princess."

Jan rolled her eyes. "It's a very long story."

***

  
The party had been interesting at first, but they'd been here for hours and hours and Jan had already seen all the women's dresses. All the adults were doing was standing around and talking too each other, and no one was interested in talking to her. All they did was tell her she looked cute and that her dress was very pretty, and ask her what she wanted Santa to bring her, like she was still a little kid. She already knew her dress was pretty, because she'd picked it out herself, and she'd figured out that Santa was actually her father last year.

"I'm in third grade," she'd told Mrs. Worthington, smiling sweetly at her. "I don't believe in Santa anymore. I asked Daddy to get me more barbies." Barbies made very good models for clothes; she'd already sewn new outfits for all the ones she already had, which meant it was time for some new ones.

Then her father had suggested that she go and find the other children and 'have some fun with them.' "I think Howard Stark's son is here," he'd said. "He's about your age."

Jan had mostly wanted to go home, but talking to some stupid boy was better than explaining what she wanted for Christmas twelve hundred times, so she had gone looking for him.

And now she had found him.

"What are you doing?"

Tony Stark's head snapped up, and he stared at Jan, looking wide-eyed and confused. "Nothing," he stammered.

He was obviously lying, because he was sitting on the floor in front of one of the big computer towers and was doing something to it.

Jan wrinkled her nose. "You're lying," she informed him. "Come on, you can tell me. I won't tell." She took a couple of steps into the room -- not too far, because if some adult came along and saw her in here with Tony it would be important to make sure they knew she'd just gotten here and hadn't been the one to take the computer apart -- and looked around.

The floor was covered with a wall-to-wall carpet a lot thinner and more worn than the rugs everywhere else in the house, and there was a rack of computer stuff against one wall, with a big bank of television screens right next to it. It had to be the control room for Mr. Osborn's security system; her dad's laboratories had a room just like this, where you could spy on people all over the building.

It was one of Jan's favorite places to wait while her father visited the lab. You could watch absolutely everyone, and they had no idea that you were looking at them. She had seen grownups doing stuff with laboratory equipment, typing on computers, sleeping with their heads down on their desks, and even, once, a man and a woman kissing.

It was also off-limits to everybody but the security guards and her dad. Which meant that Tony was definitely not supposed to be in here.

Tony folded his arms across his chest and glared up at her. His hair was sticking up, and he'd taken off his black blazer and thrown it on the floor. "I'm not doing anything." Then he turned and directed an even more poisonous glare at the big rolling chair in the middle of the room. "Warren," he hissed, "you were supposed to be keeping a lookout."

Jan walked around to the front of the chair to find Warren Worthington sitting in it, his small body almost completely swallowed up by the massive black leather chair. Warren was only in kindergarten; what was he doing in here? "Warren," she said, smiling at him. "Hi! What are you and Tony doing? I bet it's really cool."

"We're fixing the security alarm," he announced cheerfully.

Jan nodded solemnly. "I see." She turned back to Tony. "Mr. Osborn's going to kill you for breaking his security system, you know."

"I'm not going to break it." Tony pulled a plastic-coated wire loose, inspected it for a second, and then plugged it back in in a different spot.

"What are you doing, then?" she challenged.

Tony grinned. "I'm making it more sensitive. Hey, can you get me the tiny screwdriver from over there?"

"I'm not doing anything. I'm not going to be your accomplice when you break it and get caught." Jan had already been yelled at once tonight, for pouring her drink on Mr. Shaw's lap; if her dad caught her playing with Mr. Osborn's alarm system, he'd be furious.

He hadn't believed her when she'd sworn that spilling her fruit punch on Mr. Shaw was an accident. It wasn't, of course, but Mr. Shaw was creepy and had kept smiling at her and patting her hair, and anyway, he deserved it for wearing a white suite at Christmas. You weren't supposed to wear white shoes after Labor Day, and Jan was pretty sure the same rule applied to suits. And if it didn't, it should. Mr. Shaw looked like Colonel Sanders in it, if Colonel Sanders had stupid-looking sideburns.

"It's just like a girl to be useless," Tony muttered. "Minion," he snapped his fingers at Warren, "hand me the tiny screwdriver."

Warren climbed down from the chair, picked up the screwdriver in one small, chubby hand, and carried it over to Tony with great seriousness. Tony accepted it with equal seriousness, set the panel he had removed from the back of the computer tower back into place, and began putting a series of tiny screws back in.

Jan watched silently, retreating back to the doorway. If he'd lost any of those screws, he would be in real trouble; someone would probably notice they were missing.

"Is it done now?" Warren asked hopefully, peering at the computer with an intent frown on his face. "It's really boring in here, and you said you'd play Go Fish with me when you were done."

Tony considered his handiwork, his head cocked slightly to one side, then sighed. "Fine. I'm done. We need to get out of here before a new guest arrives or someone tries to go outside, anyway."

"You should probably hide," Jan told him. "You know, before they figure out you did… whatever you just did."

"He can't." Warren folded his arms and glared at her, his lower lip sticking out stubbornly. "He promised to play with me."

Jan shrugged. "You could go hide with him. We could play hide and seek. This house is huge."

"No. Go Fish. Like you promised." This to Tony.

Tony sighed. He'd obviously counted on Warren forgetting whatever bribe he'd promised him in exchange for his performing lookout duty. "I bet there's a deck of cards in that room with the big pool table."

There were a whole bunch of decks of cards in the pool table room, as well as a set of dominos and a dart board. Warren, however, couldn't be diverted from his goal of playing one specific card game and nothing else, even after they'd already played it three times.

The third time Jan watched Warren's lower lip quiver when he lost, an uneasy feeling of guilt over beating the pants off a kindergartner over and over started to make the whole thing less fun. "Maybe you'll win the next game," she said, looking pointedly at Tony, who had won all three games so far.

Tony shook his head, and adjusted the cards in his hand. "No he won't," he said. "He's not very good."

Jan kicked him in the shin with the toe of her red patent-leather Mary Jane. "You're supposed to let little kids win," she hissed.

Tony stared at her blankly, like she'd just suggested that he do something inexplicable and silly, like wear a lampshade on his head, or go to school naked. "Why?" He pulled his cards in against his chest, as if he suspected that this was some form of cheating on her part. "If we make it easy for him, he'll never really learn how to play."

"I'm not a little kid," Warren said. "I can too win on my own."

And that was when the alarm went off.

Tony dropped his cards, a wide grin spreading across his face. "I knew it would work," he announced.

"What did you do?" Jan demanded.

"I reset the alarm system to go off every time someone opens a window or door," he announced proudly.

"Oh. That's…" actually pretty cool. "I wonder if the police will come."

"They'll probably stop after the first ten times or so."

Jan laughed. "Someone will reset the alarm or turn it off before then."

"No they won't." Tony's grin morphed into a smirk. "I fixed it so they can't."

"You can do that?" That was the kind of thing hackers in movies did, not something real kids were supposed to be able to do. "Are you some kind of genius or something?"

"Yes." His tone implied that this was obvious.

"So, can you do math in your head? Or speak any other languages?"

Tony shrugged. "Everyone can do math in their head."

The alarm went off six more times in the next ten minutes, and then Jan's dad came to find them. "Thank goodness you're okay," he said. "You can't wander off like this, Janet. The police have already been here twice. They think someone might be trying to break in."

"I didn't wander off," Jan pointed out, stung by the injustice of the scolding. "You told me to find the other children and I did. I've been with them for hours and hours. Playing cards." She pointed at the playing cards scattered on the floor, in case there was any doubt.

Her father dragged all three of them back out into the living room, where a red-faced Mr. Osborn was explaining to a policeman, through clenched teeth, that the alarm system was broken, and that the problem was going to be corrected shortly.

Warren's parents swooped down on them immediately, his father picking him up and carrying him away, Warren giving them a little wave over his shoulder as they went.

Tony's parents didn't come to fetch him, so he stayed with Jan and her dad, watching the show with a little smirk on his face.

It was awesome. The police came two more times before they refused to come again, and Mr. Osborn called the alarm company three times. And still, the alarm kept going off.

Jan was careful to keep a straight face through all of it, because if her dad figured out that she knew what was going on and hadn't said anything, he was going to be angry. He always talked about taking responsibility for your actions, for one thing, and for another, this was way, way worse than spilling punch on Mr. Shaw's suit.

By the time the pair of computer experts showed up an hour and a half later, Tony was smirking like he'd won some kind of prize. It was almost a disappointment when the piercing wails of the alarm system stopped.

Then, of course, they found out that someone had sabotaged it.

Through out the whole thing, Jan's dad had been talking to other adults like the party hadn't been interrupted at all, while keeping one eye on her and Tony. Once the announcement that the system had been tampered with was made -- Mr. Osborn looked like he was about to have a heart attack from pure rage, by this point -- he turned to Jan and Tony and looked at them solemnly. "Anthony," he said, "I hear you're a very bright boy."

"Not really," Tony said, suddenly wary, because he'd figured out the same thing Jan had, which was that they were both busted.

Her dad's lips twitched, like he was trying not to smile. "Is there anything you want to say to Mr. Osborn and the rest of the guests? Maybe an apology?"

"I didn't do anything," he protested, not very convincingly.

"Janet?"

"He didn't-" Jan started. "I mean- I didn't know it was going to cause this much trouble."

Her father shook his head. "And you didn’t think it might be a good idea to tell us when it was causing trouble. The police had to come here four times, Jan. What if someone had committed a crime while they were wasting their time coming here for no reason?"

"I didn't think of that," Jan admitted, staring down at her shiny red shoes. When you put it like that, it didn't seem quite as much fun anymore.

"I'm sorry," Tony said, in a very small voice. "Please don't make me apologize to Mr. Osborn. He'll tell my dad."

"No," Jan's dad said, " _you're_ going to tell your father. And then both of you," he pointed at Jan sternly, "are going to tell Mr. Osborn how very, very sorry you are for wrecking his party."

Jan kicked Tony in the shins again. "I _told_ you we were going to get in trouble."

  


***

"I'm still not sure I've forgiven your father for making me confess." Tony shook his head, his smile self-deprecating. "My father had already figured out that it was me, but if I hadn't had to apologize to Norman Osborn, then at least he wouldn't have been publicly embarrassed by having everyone know it was his son who ruined the entire evening."

"Apologizing was the right thing to do," Steve couldn’t help but point out. "You were damaging his property and wasting police manpower."

Jan wrinkled her nose. "Please try not to sound so much like my father, Cap. It makes it much harder to fantasize about you naked."

Steve could feel his ears burning. He stared down at the little paper circles he was painting Christmas-themed designs onto, suddenly unable to meet Jan's eyes. "You don't actually-" he started.

"Aren't you supposed to be fantasizing about Hank naked?" Tony asked, with a raised eyebrow and a smirk. Hank went red.

Jan pointed at him with the paintbrush she was holding. "Shut up and finish your popcorn chain."

Jan fantasized about him naked? Surely that had been a joke. Steve returned his gaze to his paper disk, trying to pretend he was focusing all his attention on getting the shape of the cardinal's open red wings just right.

Tony picked up another kernel of popcorn and stabbed a needle into it. "Not that anyone blames you," he went on. He slid the popcorn kernel off the needle and along the string until it joined its fluffy, white brethren. "You know, I could just have somebody buy you a bunch of red and gold Christmas balls."

"Absolutely not." Jan resumed applying gold paint to the walnut she was holding. She was making Hank do the pine cones, which were more complicated and more likely to leave paint on your hands. "We are not having some soulless modern tree with generic ornaments. We are having the Victorian Christmas I've wanted since I was six, and the ornaments will be handmade. You're just trying to get out of stringing popcorn."

"Yes," Tony said, "because I have better things to do with my time. Why don't I make you some metal stars or something?"

"You can do that when the popcorn chain is done." She paused, frowning slightly, and added, "It's too bad there are no pictures of you with Santa. It's just what the library needs as a finishing touch."

"My parents never took me to see Santa." Inexplicably, Tony actually sounded smug about that. Steve guessed that he hadn't yet noticed the picture Jan _had_ put up in the library, which featured a sullen-looking adolescent Tony in a blue, pointed hat with a sheer veil hanging from the tip, the kind of thing princesses wore in movies set during the middle ages. Two younger boys decked out in knights' tabards and swords stood on either side of him, and a small, blonde girl in a glittery silver tiara stood front and center, smiling winningly at the camera. Kneeling next to her was a dark-haired girl around Tony's age wearing a pair of fairy wings; Steve hadn't realized that it was Jan on first glance, but in retrospect, it was obvious.

"They took pictures of you performing in that medieval Christmas play, though," he told Tony.

Tony blinked, his eyebrows drawing together in a frown. "I was never in a Christmas pageant."

Jan was grinning evilly again. "It wasn't a pageant. We were playing dress up. It was Felicia Hardy's idea. I think she was about five at the time."

***

  
Jan was pretty sure that drafting one's guests to serve as impromptu babysitters was not proper social etiquette. Especially when said guests had much, much better things to do, like be anywhere that was not the same room as two six-year-olds. Well, one six-year-old and an eight-year-old, really; Warren Worthington the Third (he'd started insisting on being called by his full name, for god only knew what reason) was just as much of a brat as any little kid, while Harry Osborn almost never spoke. That was okay, though. Felicia Hardy spoke enough for both of them.

"And Daddy said I was the prettiest angel in the Christmas pageant. I had a sparkly gold halo and a white dress. And wings with glitter on them. They're really fairy wings, but fairy wings are prettier and feather wings are too messy."

She could have been in Europe right now. Cathy had offered to let Jan come to her family's ski chalet in Switzerland, where there would have been hot chocolate and snow and probably cute ski instructors, too, but her father had given a little speech about how Christmas was a time for family togetherness and said no.

So Cathy had taken Heather with her, despite the fact that Heather was a nasty, manipulative bitch, and Jan was stuck here, because babysitting bored, hyperactive kids while her father schmoozed some other businessman was exactly what she thought of when she thought of when she thought of family togetherness.

"Why do we care about your stupid fairy wings?" Warren Worthington the Third demanded.

"They weren't stupid," Felicia responded. "They were angel wings. Magic angel wings. And I got to wear to them and you didn't."

Warren made a face. "Why would I want to wear them?"

Harry said nothing, too busy scribbling in one of Felicia's coloring books to even look up. He might be slightly creepy, but at least he was well behaved.

"So," Jan said brightly, "who wants to play cards?"

"M'coloring," Harry mumbled, still not looking up.

"Cards are boring," Warren announced, at the same time that Felicia stated, with the air of one issuing a proclamation,

"I don't like cards."

Okay, cards were clearly a bust. Trying to get everyone to color had only worked on Harry.

"Let's play dress up," Felicia suggested, bouncing on her toes.

"We're already dressed up." Jan brushed at her skirt, which was real Scottish tartan and very cute, but also incredibly itchy, even over a slip. All the chairs in Felicia's room were built on a 1/2 scale, and even though she was painfully short, Jan was still too big for them, and had to sit with her legs at weird angles that made her skirt ride up.

"I thought Tony was supposed to be here," Warren said. "He always has robots."

Jan groaned, rolling her eyes. If this year's Christmas party was true to form, Tony would probably have at least three robots, three apparently being the optimum number for staging robot gladiator battles. Most of the adults her father knew had banned Tony's toys from their houses - Norman Osborn had even banned Tony himself -- but the Hardys were naïve and trusting.

"Tony was supposed to be here," she said. He was probably hiding somewhere programming the Hardys' VCR to explode. Tony seemed to get steadily weirder every year

"He can play dress-up, too," Felicia announced.

Jan started to grin. "I think," she said, "that that's an awesome idea."

***

  
"It might have been Felicia Hardy's idea," Tony said, "but you're the one who made us choose coordinating medieval-themed outfits, and then told me that I had to wear a blue princess hat instead of a pink one because blue was a better color on me."

"Blue _is_ a better color on you."

"But the pink one had sparkly stars made out of glitter on it." Tony smirked. "It was so much prettier." Then, when he realized that Steve and Hank were both staring at him. "Felicia Hardy put it on me. I didn't pick it myself. And you've got no room to talk. Your costume has tiny wings sticking out of the sides of your head."

"I thought you liked my costume." It was silly to feel hurt - the wings did look kind of goofy, after all, but he'd only been twenty-one and he'd thought they evoked the spirit of Mercury's winged sandals.

"I do." Tony grinned at him, and Steve found his irritation vanishing. Tony hadn't smiled often enough since the mess with Justin Hammer. "That doesn't mean the wings don't look ridiculous."

Hank, on the other hand, was frowning. "Were your childhoods entirely devoid of adult supervision?"

"Only on major holidays," Jan replied, at the same time that Tony said,

"No. I had Jarvis."

The more Steve heard about Tony's childhood, the less he thought of Tony's parents. Still, "I spent every summer as a kid running around the Lower East Side with no adult supervision at all, and it never hurt me." Well, except for the time he'd fallen off a fire escape and broken his arm, but that had been right outside his own bedroom window, and had had less to do with lack of supervision and more to do with the fact that he'd been trying to jump from one landing to the other like Errol Flynn.

"Yes," Hank said, waving a gilded pine cone at him, "but that was probably because both of your parents were working. Not because they were borderline abusive."

"My father was anything but abusive, he was just always busy." Jan sounded slightly annoyed now. "If anything, he let me get away with too much. You worked in his lab for two years in grad school, Hank, you know what he was like. Norman Osborn, on the other hand, I'm not so sure about."

"I deserved every bit of shouting I got over the alarm system. He still hates me, too." Tony made a face. "He sent me a snide email after the disaster at the UN." He fell silent then, staring down at his suddenly-still hands, the popcorn garland hanging limp between them.

Steve racked his brain for something to change the subject. "As long as we're hearing all about your misspent youth, there's something I've been wondering for ages."

"What's that?" Tony asked quietly, not looking up.

"What the hell possessed you to blow up a microwave?" Jan had mentioned it after Tony had been unmasked in South America, when she'd told Tony that she'd already known Iron Man's identity, and Jarvis had cited the incident several times when explaining why Tony wasn't allowed to do anything in the kitchen but operate the coffee machine and open the refrigerator.

Tony's distant expression vanished, to be replaced by a lopsided little smirk. "I wanted to prove that I could."

  


***

Tony had grown to dread holidays, all of which involved spending long periods of time sitting in awkward silence while his father lectured him about how he was a failure. This year's Thanksgiving had been especially bad, because Howard Stark was still livid over the fact that Tony had leaked company secrets to Sunset Bain over the summer.

The worst part was, Sunset had made a fool of him, and he knew it. He had fallen for every line she fed him, had actually been stupid enough to think she cared about him. That she was honestly interested in his ideas and his work.

The worst part was, he couldn't actually bring himself to be sorry he'd slept with her. It had been fun, and even knowing that she'd thought he was no good in bed, that she'd just been using him… if she had shown up on MIT's campus at any point over the semester, he would probably have fallen right back into lust with her, if not love.

Sunset was nearly five years older than he was, sophisticated and witty and really, really hot.

He wished he was back at the Bain's beach cottage with her now, sitting naked in the hot tub and drinking margaritas, or back at MIT with Tiberius, sitting around with a couple of beers and talking about computers, instead of sitting in the mansion's kitchen surrounded by bored and whiney adolescents.

Surely seventeen was too old to sit at the kids' table, even for people who weren't already college sophomores. At least Janet Van Dyne had been exiled to the kinder-kitchen, too. In the years since he'd last seen her, she had gone from being a snotty, slightly pudgy twelve-year-old to a slender, delicate girl with just enough curves to be interesting, who was better dressed than half the 'real' adults there.

Warren, Harry, and Felicia, on the other hand, had not improved with age. Warren had spent the entire meal this far in sullen silence; Harry had gone from being the kid who never talked to the kid who never shut up, chattering non-stop with some friend he'd brought from school about online role-playing games; and Felicia reminded Tony of a miniature version of some of the more vapid sorority girls he'd met, only instead of being a hot, older woman, she was barely into puberty, young enough to make the way she flirted with him creepy. Right now, she was talking to Jan about make-up, or dresses, or some other girl thing, and he was glad of it.

Tony chose the least boring conversation topic currently available. "Have you figured out any of the cheat codes for Warcraft yet?" he asked Harry and his friend.

"No," Harry's friend said, looking downcast. "I die all the time, too. I only get to play at Harry's house, so I'm not very good."

"I could teach you how to fix that," Tony offered. "If you know the code and how to access the servers, you can-"

"Be incredibly lame?" Warren interrupted.

"Win," Tony finished.

Warren rolled his eyes. "Who cares about winning some gay video game?"

"It's an online roll-playing game," Harry corrected, flushing. Combined with his screaming red hair, the effect was unfortunate.

"That just makes it gayer."

"Video games are boring." Felicia wrinkled her nose in imitation of Jan, then added, "I'm sure Peter's really good at them, though."

"Not really," Harry said, at the same time the other kid, Peter, said,

"Yeah!" in a bright, enthusiastic voice.

Jan sighed, and went back to poking at her pumpkin cheesecake with a fork. "How many calories do you think this has?" she asked.

"More than you want to think about," Tony told her.

Jan shrugged, and took a bite of her desert anyway, while a heavy silence settled over the room.

It was finally broken by Felicia. "Do you have a boyfriend?" she asked Jan.

"Yes," Jan said. She didn't elaborate further, so Felicia turned to Tony, fluttered her eyelashes at him, and asked,

"Do you have a girlfriend?"

'No,' Tony thought, 'because she told me I was a lousy lay and dumped me.' He wondered for a frozen moment if giving Ty a blow-job counted, or if whatever had happened after the homecoming party with Ty and two girls that he couldn’t really remember counted. It was all academic anyway, because it wasn't as if he could say anything about it to an eleven-year-old.

He tried to think of something, anything to say, as it dawned on him that the silence had gone on for way too long.

"Maybe he has a boyfriend," Warren started, with a nasty little smirk. "Maybe he-"

"Who wants to make the microwave explode?" Tony blurted out.

Harry's friend -- Peter -- sat forward in his chair, his eyes lighting up with glee at the prospect. Maybe this wasn't going to be as boring as Tony had thought.

"You're joking, right?" Jan asked, staring at him with something that was either suspicion or horror.

"You can make the microwave explode?" Warren's eyebrows went up, and there was grudging respect in his voice.

Tony shrugged. "It's not that difficult. All it would take is a little re-wiring, and a small boost to the power."

"You're not really going to do that," Jan said. It wasn't a question.

"Why not? I live here. Jarvis won't mind. He wants a new microwave anyway." Tony was relatively sure Jarvis didn't want to acquire a new microwave because the old one had exploded, but he was generally a good sport about that kind of thing. He would probably only be extra-British and sarcastic for about a week.

Peter and Warren were already on their feet, Peter bouncing slightly as if he were too excited to stay still. Harry, though, was still sitting, a frown drawing his bright-red eyebrows together. "Aren't you going to get into trouble with your dad?" he asked, in the tones of someone desperately hoping the answer was no, but sure it would be yes.

"The kitchen is Jarvis's. My dad doesn't care about it." Tony went through his pockets as he spoke, pulling out the tiny screwdrivers - flathead and Philips - the pocket welding torch, a handful of pieces of wire, and a tiny screw from a computer case. "I've got everything I need here, too. Good."

"But won't he be angry?" Harry persisted, and Tony remembered Norman Osborn screaming at him after he'd hacked his security alarm, and the way Harry had never talked as a little kid.

"What's he going to do," he asked, waving a hand dismissively, "send me back to MIT early? Like that's a punishment." His father would be livid, of course, and he'd probably claim to be disappointed in Tony's lack of maturity, too, but he'd been angry at Tony since Baintronics had gotten their hands on the schematics for SI's next major product launch, and Tony had been a disappointment to him for as long as he could remember.

"Why?" Felicia asked.

"Because school is full of gorgeous older girls." And Ty was there, even better looking than some of those girls, and always full of advice on where the best party was and ideas for their next engineering or computer project.

"No, why do you want to blow up the microwave?"

Tony, Harry, Peter, Warren, and even Jan all looked at her blankly.

"Because it would be cool," Peter said. Harry nodded in enthusiastic support.

"We can do it outside," Tony said. He crossed the kitchen and unplugged the microwave, picking it up and holding it to his chest. "Jarvis doesn't want a new kitchen."

"Can Harry and I help?" Peter asked, almost hopping along at Tony's side as he carried the microwave out the kitchen door and into the back yard. Harry and Warren followed. Jan and Felicia did not.

"I'm really good in science class. I bet I could learn how to do it real fast. What are you going to do, anyway? I mean, when you said explode, did you mean like a little flash inside the microwave and then it shorts out, or did you mean Death Star blowing up?"

"Do you ever need to breath?" Tony asked him.

"No, seriously, how big will the explosion be?"

The explosion, it turned out, was slightly larger than Tony had expected it to be. He had left the outdoor outlet's lack of an adaptor and slightly larger power output out of his calculations.

As adults became to pour out of the house, several of them already shouting, Tony stared at the small, smoking crater in the formerly perfect lawn and reflected that Jarvis was going to kill him.

Even the explosion hadn't been as satisfying as he'd thought it would be. Sunset still hadn't really loved him, his father still thought he was a spineless playboy, and he still didn't have anyone in New York to talk to.

"That was awesome!" Peter crowed. "Do you guys have another microwave?"

***

  
"You had much more fun on holidays than I ever did," Hank said. "We just went to visit my cousins every year."

"If they're anything like my cousin Morgan, you have my sympathy." Tony slid the last piece of popcorn into place and knotted off the end of the string, then coiled the entire chain up into a loop and set it down on the floor.

Hank seemed to take that as a cue to set his own half finished basket of pine cones aside.  
"Why?" he asked. "What's she like?"

"A sponge. And she's a he."

Steve, meanwhile, was occupied with trying not laugh. He would probably have thought then entire thing was brilliant when he was seventeen, but it really wasn't an appropriate subject for laughter, given that it centered around property destruction. "I hope you're not planning on blowing anything up this year."

"Damn," Tony said, with a grin that made Steve's body flush with heat. "There go my plans for the entire holiday."

"Well, you better plan to come to the party on Christmas Day, because it was your idea in the first place, and I've already put hours of work into it." What Jan didn't mention was that she had volunteered for all of, and had seemed to enjoy it immensely.

"Well, I have a company party on Christmas Eve, and I was planning on spending Christmas Day making things explode, but since Cap's vetoed that, I guess I can come to your party."

"That's right," Jan said. "The rest of us ought to do something on Christmas Eve, too."

"IgotusdinnerreservationsatBouley," Hank muttered, the words blending together incomprehensibly.

Jan, however, seemed to have understood, because her eyes lit up, and she clasped her hands together eagerly. "Oh, _Hank_. Really?"

"I asked Tony for the name of a good restaurant, and he said-"

"Thanks, handsome," Jan said. She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. "You're the best."

"What kind of plans do you have?" Tony asked Steve.

Steve felt his face heat again. "I was, ah, going to go to church." Compared to a romantic dinner or a party, it sounded almost embarrassingly tame.

"I should have known." Tony's smile took the sting out of the words. "Here's a deal for you: I'll go to church with you if you come with me to SI's company Christmas party so I have someone to talk to. I took Pepper last year, but she just started dating Happy, so I need to bring someone else."

Steve felt his blush intensify, his face burning. The idea that Tony, who seemed to have a dozen women at his beck and call, would rather spend time with Steve than with some gorgeous doll who would doubtless be thrilled to be the object of Tony Stark's attentions, was oddly gratifying. Still, "Wouldn't you rather bring a date?"

Tony shrugged. "You're more interesting than most of my dates."

And that was something that Steve would never understand. "Why do you date women if you don't actually like them?"

Tony arched his eyebrows meaningfully. "We've been over that before, Steve."

"Yes," Steve said, "but I still don't understand why you'd want to have sex with someone you thought was boring."

"They're not boring in bed. Veronica Vogue can do this thing with her-"

"I'm not interested," Steve interrupted quickly. "Anyway, I don't think there's anything wrong with waiting until you've found someone you care about."

Tony stared at him. "Please tell me you're not a virgin, because would shatter so many of my illusions."

"I'm not!" Tony seemed to have a special skill for keeping Steve in a constant state of stammering schoolboy embarrassment. The fact that Tony himself was so confident and obviously experienced with women, yet so totally unaware of the effect he had on Steve -- he had to be, or surely he wouldn't say things like that -- only made it worse. "I just think-"

"I don't think there's anything wrong with saving yourself for someone you care about," Hank interrupted in tones that sounded prim even to Steve.

Tony started to snicker. "Don't tell me you-"

"I think that's very romantic of you," Jan said firmly, glaring at Tony, who hastily stopped snickering.

There was a moment of silence, and then Hank blurted out, "I wonder if we'll have frost boar again."

Jan gave him a funny look.

"For dinner, I mean. It was good."

"I'd be happy to come to your party," Steve said. "Both of them. If you're sure you don't mind giving up kisses under the mistletoe."

Tony stared at him, an odd expression on his face. Not displeased, not at all, just… odd. "I don't-" he started.

"Mistletoe." Jan snapped her fingers. "I knew I'd forgotten something. I found this beautiful garland to hang in the doorway to the living room."

"No," Steve said firmly, at the same time that Tony said,

"Not unless you want to explain to Thor why we have it in the house."

Jan blinked. "Why? What's wrong with mistletoe?"

 

 **~End~**


End file.
